File this one under "Women in Refrigerators" AND "Fridge Horror"...
...since it took about an hour for it to sink in.
(At least half of you will not care about this since it involves comic books, but I feel compelled to write it.)
So, the antecedents: DC Comics used to have a book called Robin (I think you can guess what it was a spin-off of), whereby the protagonist was a teenage boy called Tim Drake. Never really one of my favorite characters, but generally a decent enough guy. Oh, he could be a bit of a jerk at times, usually--but not always--either unwittingly or because of some edict of Batman's, but on the balance he was likeable.
About six years ago (in real time--two to three years in the setting), around the time that DC was entering a several year period where their level of misogyny was even more horrifying than usual, Tim started behaving like a real asshole with alarming regularity. Ironically, this doesn't seem to have been a deliberate move by any of the writers or editors, so much as the unintended consequence of the truly atrocious writing and editing that had become the standard at DC. But even though readers might know that, it didn't change the fact that he was being an asshole. Especially in terms of the way the female characters around him have suffered for it. Especially in terms of his attitudes towards some female characters who were much-beloved by feminist comic readers, like me. Especially in terms of his attitudes towards a couple of my favorite characters.
Long story short, I started to really dislike the character.
So after five or six years of having my annoyance with Tim keeping steady at a level of about 3 millishinjis (a millishinji being a unit of measure for my distaste for a character, defined--as one might expect--as 1/1000th of my hatred for the protagonist of End of Evangelion), he's been becoming much less of an asshole. I starting thinking I could start liking him again.
And then, when I was poking through a friend's wiki, I noticed a particular little tidbit of information that, while mostly a good thing, rather implies that Tim has been achieving an all new level of asshole behavior all this time right under our noses.
More backstory: under the writing auspices of Bill Willingham (a name that will live in infamy for comic-reading feminists), around the same time that Tim's asshole behavior began, Tim's stepmother Dana Drake was checked into a mental institution under the rather sketchy notion that the death of Tim's father had caused her to have a nervous breakdown. This was a clear attempt by Willingham to shuffle her out of the way as he apparently had no idea what to do with her. (Considering that there are any number of ways that a talented writer willing to expend a little effort could find storytelling potential in a teenager whose only surviving relative and legal guardian is a stepmother who wants to do her best for him but is relatively young and largely inexperienced at parenting, this just drives home how incredibly lazy Willingham's work on Robin was.) A bit later, as a result of one of those company-wide crossover events that comic companies persist in doing even though they're extremely detrimental to the company's individual books, the city the institution was in was hit by a weapon of mass destruction, and Dana was heavily implied to be dead. Admittedly, there was never any real confirmation of this, since everyone--except Batgirl, of course--seemed to forget about the city and its destruction in the space of about a page.
(This is one of many, many instances in fiction in general and comics in particular--especially at DC around that time--of what fandom calls "Women in Refrigerators" and TVTropes generalizes to Stuffed in the Fridge: the killing of a female character not for any reason related to their own story, but merely as a source of cheap angst or motivation for revenge for a male character. Female characters, in the minds of many, are disposable and only there as plot devices for male characters, not to have story arcs in their own right. Dana Drake is, admittedly, only a minor character--whereas comics often does this to major ones who were once protagonists in their own right, in ways that have nothing to do with their own character arcs or let them go out heroically--but still... it's cheap, lazy storytelling. And pointless. It was forgotten almost immediately.)
Under those circumstances, I suppose it's understandable that Tim hasn't made a single mention of her since before she was even killed, when he left her in the mental institution. You'd think that fandom would eventually tire of having to resort to "repression" as an excuse while Tim seems to completely forget that anyone dead and female he's known ever ever existed, but it makes a certain degree of sense.
...So imagine my surprise when I saw on the wiki that employees of DC had stated in an interview that Dana Drake had actually survived and been evacuated and was alive all this time.
Initially, I was rather pleased by this. One less female character meaninglessly exterminated. Potential source of future storylines. But about an hour later, when I was on patrol (always a time where a lot of brainstorming happens, since there's little else to occupy my thoughts), it hit me. (Hence this being "Fridge Horror".)
If Dana Drake has been alive these last (in the setting) two years or so, then the fact that Tim has not acknowledged her existence in all that time is downright horrific.
He hasn't mentioned her or seen her once in that time, as far as I know. Nor can he really have been visiting her "off-screen", since for the year right after she was almost killed (during a company-wide timeskip called One Year Later that was, you guessed it, detrimental to every book involved), he was explicitly said to have been traveling the world with Batman. Where did she wind up after the evacuation? In a refugee camp with the other survivors? In another institution? If the latter, what are her chances of recovery after this fresh new trauma when her only family is pretending she never existed? Is anyone still paying the bills? What happens when she gets out? She hasn't been working during the intervening time, obviously, and even before that her career as a physical therapist wasn't exactly at its peak due to her having to move away from and then back to Gotham to stay with the Drake family. It's not exactly easy to find employment after spending time institutionalized, either. She has nothing to live on while she gets back on her feet, because any inheritance that she might have been owed, Tim stole when he destroyed his father's will and replaced it with a forgery leaving all the money to a fictitious relative so Tim could control it. (We don't know if Jack Drake actually left Dana anything or not, and neither does Tim... he destroyed the will unread.) Note that Tim was adopted by Bruce Wayne soon afterwards and has access to the resources of someone who spends billions of dollars a year on bat-shaped aircraft, so it's not like he needed the money. Dana, on the other hand, has nothing and no one waiting for her when she recovers and leaves the hospital. If she ever recovers.
Nor could Dana be considered a "wicked stepmother" in any way, shape or form. She was never anything but kind and caring to Tim, and one could even argue that she was more attentive to him than either of his biological parents.
So, in essence, Dana gave her all to the Drake family, and Tim repaid that loyalty by abandoning her to what is in all likelihood a life of abject misery. And thus, Tim Drake is back on my shit list. (This may have sort of subtlely shone through in my attitude when I reviewed a few pages of his book last week.)
I swear, it's like DC Comics wants me to hate their work and quit giving them my money.